A difficulty in addressing a manufacturing scheduling problem can be related to the problem size. Typical manufacturing scheduling problems involve a large number of stations and a significant number of tasks to be performed on the stations. For example, scheduling can depend on a number of tools, a number of lots, a sequential order of operations, constraints, etc. Traditional scheduling systems spend a great amount of time and computing resources in solving a scheduling problem that involves many variables and factors. The difficulty grows very fast as the size of the scheduling problem grows. For this reason, large scheduling problems can be impossible to solve directly.